Do backups. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, backup would be it. The long term benefits of backups have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

But doing backups correctly is even more important, as I learned this week.

Coming from Linux land I loved running Beta’s on the upcoming release’s, more often than not, they were actually quite solid, but they also evolved daily. It’s cool booting up each day and grabbing a whole load of updates that were going to refine what was already a relatively solid experience. That said, Beta’s are still not for the faint-hearted. Especially if after an update and there goes your GUI environment.

This week, I tried running the Apple iOS 18 beta and macOS 15 beta. It is a wholly different beast to Linux. It does not evolve the same way, the bugs, and issues there are going to stay there for several weeks. Only after a developer beta is released, which then eventually makes it to the public beta. It seems you might go one month to the next on the public channel before things get resolved. I did not get this going in, now I know. To me, that sounds like the difference to an Alpha and Beta channel, so what does the Alpha even look like? Not public, at least.

Living in Ireland, within the EU, there are a host of features that are not even available in the Beta’s for users in the EU to try. They may not even make it to the release candidates. Even features like iPhone Mirroring could not be used. Apple Intelligence looks like it may never come to the EU until either the EU or Apple comes to some agreement. So that’s another feature set that is never going to get experienced. On iOS, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to customise the home screen and apps, while the new Passwords app is superb. 

Really looking forward to those in the official rollout come September or October. Just CarPlay and Maps caused me to knock the Beta experience in the head. macOS 15 was the source of most of my headaches though, Safari was not loading pages right, apps offering you new features only to get the ‘not available in your region’ message. Extensions and some other apps were misfiring, Microsoft Teams were unable to run right either with microphone issues… needless to say, forget this on your primary machine.

Hence, my problem.

Yes, they do warn you to run the Beta’s on secondary equipment.

YOLO!

Oh, and did you know that if you want to roll back to the previous version of macOS, you need a second Mac for the process if you run Apple Silicon?

I missed that memo.

This left me needing to go down a different route, which basically boiled down to;

Step 1 — Create a bootable USB of macOS 14

Step 2 — Reformat my Mac’s hard drive (complete wipe of all data)

Step 3 — Reinstall macOS 14

Step 4 — Use migration assistant to do a recovery from a previous backup.

The above is not the recommended method of getting things back to the pre-beta operating system. Officially, Apple wants you to have two Mac’s, and there is a recovery process you go through. See here. So I did roll the dice with the above, but it has worked, and I am back to the land of the stable commercial release.

On the face of it, getting things back to normal on the iOS looked simple. Apple just wants you to plug it into your phone, boot into recovery mode, reformat, then download a cloud backup, and that’s you up and running again. It is all laid out nicely on their website here.

Funny fact, if the cloud backup was done in the beta, e.g. iOS 18, you can not use it to recover a previous release, e.g. iOS 17!

Who knew?

What this meant, in reality, is that I have lost a few messages, and have had to waste a lot of time resetting up my apps. Some remember the settings, many do not. Some message apps have lost a few days of content, but that’s the end of it.

For future reference, before trying the iOS beta, do a backup that is saved locally of the current stable commercial release because that’s the only backup that is going to work if you want to go back.

Moreover, this was the point where I came incredibly close to getting locked out of my Apple ID. I had made a password change in the new Passwords Application. This did not update the password in the current Passwords application that I rolled back to. If it was not for having access to my recovery code, this might have turned into a very costly experience.

I have learned a wealth of information from this, and it was really nice to be tinkering on a terminal screen again, even if it was just to create the bootable USB. This is also why I am not going into what I did in great detail, just the overview. On Linux, none of this tinkering ever felt like it could end up in hardware being totally unrecoverable. With Home directories, I could bounce back and forth between different distro’s and never lost a thing. But experience is also a great teacher. That degree of comfort only came from two decades of working within Linux. There were a few moments when I went down this road with the Mac that things got a bit too close for comfort.

What saved me? Well, the documentation on the Apple website is first class, if you have all the right tools to hand. A pretty good sense of what should work from previous experiences. Hence, me going down the road of a reformat and reinstall of the operating system. There is always a glut of content from various tech guides and suggestions on websites, which needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Assumptions are sometimes made, steps missed, or just wildly out of date! They do not claim to be technical manuals. One major advantage here is that the unknowns are much reduced thanks to everyone being on mostly the same. What works on one, should work on the other. Special attention needs to me made if what you are reading is referring to Apple Intel or Apple Silicon. That’s a game-changer.

Will I do this again? Of course, I will. It was fun to get my toes wet again. Though, maybe I go hunting for something cheap and used to do this on for future adventures. There is a wealth of hacks online to get around the region restrictions, that alone might make it a bit of fun.

As always, be excellent to each other.

And trust me on the backups.